Why Israel Has Been Forced to Go to War…writes Dennis MacEoin

I want you to imagine this. An independent Scotland, fired up by new-found freedoms and ruled by President Robbie Burns II, bursts into ructions of tartan nationalism.

Dennis MacEoin

An army of men wearing kilts and sporrans, playing horrendous squalling tunes on their war pipes, advances to the border, calling for the destruction of England and the murder or expulsion of everyone who lives on what, they say, is former Scottish soil. Specially trained militias roll up and start to fire rockets into Northumberland and Newcastle, where I live. As some years pass, the rockets get bigger and their range longer, until York and Leeds are threatened. Thousands of these rockets are fired, and even if they do little physical harm, they force the inhabitants of the English North to cower in bomb shelters, running to them when sirens announce a fifteen-second gap before the latest rockets fall. Add to this that Scottish fighters have been infiltrating England for years beyond number, detonating car bombs, slitting throats, and blowing themselves up in shopping malls, restaurants and town squares, using suicide belts to kill as many English men and women and children as possible. In one case, a Scottish woman, treated for severe burns in the burns unit at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary, returns for out-patient treatment wearing an explosive belt designed to murder the doctors and nurses who improved her life and is only caught thanks to the vigilance of soldiers at a checkpoint built to prevent such incidents.

Now ask yourself, what would the government of the UK do? Send for the Archbishop of Canterbury to organize national prayer vigils? Wring their hands and hope the belligerent Scots soon see the error of their ways? Apologize to their sworn enemies and evacuate the country (except, perhaps, Celtic Wales), relocating in a distant desert or hell-pit, assuming anyone, fired by post-colonial outrage, would take them? Do a Jim Jones and deliver bottles of cyanide-laced Flavor Aid to every household, and apologizing to Scotland for forcing its undertakers to remove and cremate the bodies?

You know the answer as well as I do. Now, think again. The Scots love us and will probably against devolution. We love them and their Tam O’Shanters and their Loch Ness Monster. For bagpipes we may prefer the sweet tones of Irish uilleann pipes or Northumbrian pipes. But we have had our last wars with the Scots, who mean us no harm.

For Scotland in the first paragraph, write Gaza. For Scots, write Palestinians. The rest is true. The rain of missiles since 2007, the endless terror attacks on civilians before the security barrier almost put an end to them. The incitement in the Hamas Charter of 1988 to kill all Jews, never to make peace, never to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, never even to sit down to hold peace talks (which are called ‘a waste of time’). Palestinians suffer, but that doesn’t matter to Hamas (or, indeed, Fatah, who issue similar threats), for whom martyrdom is the highest aspiration. In Gaza and the West Bank (now allied in a unity government), the murderers of children and families are celebrated as national heroes, worthy of emulation. Can the UN cure that sickness? Will the Arab and Muslim states even try? Will the left in Europe and America stop their attacks and vilifications of Israel and Jews? Left-wingers who, not long ago, marched in cities in Europe chanting ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’.

And Jews will go to be gassed the moment Hamas and its allies are victorious, and they will be victorious if Israel ever slackens in its self-defence and remains passive in its response to deadly rocket fire from a terrorist regime. Make no mistake about that. By no means are all Palestinians Nazis, but Hamas and its allies are the nearest thing since 1945. Yet throughout the world’s media, Israel, one of the world’s finest democracies, a country that even as I write is performing heart operations on Palestinian children, is called the aggressor, its acts of self defence pilloried as unbalanced. Of course, it’s unbalanced. If your enemy refuses to make peace and establish secure borders for both sides, if they do everything in their power to kill you and destroy your cities, what choice would anyone have but to keep responding and responding yet again until they come to their senses, acknowledge international law, and make peace for their own sakes as much as for yours?

For two thousand years, Jews — I am not one — have been tortured, killed, expelled, and exterminated without respite. They have at last found, through the auspices of the League of Nations and the United Nations, a haven, a place where they have a right to live in peace and security for once, and from which they can continue to make a most extraordinary contribution to the well-being of mankind. And Hamas pounds their haven with high explosives and threatens genocide. This piece will attract comment, and that is well and good. But as lifelong liberal, I will listen openly to reasoned criticism, not accusations that Israel is a “Nazi’ state, an ‘apartheid’ state or any other of the patent nonsense that so many in the far left and Islamists throw out. Palestinian lives are important, which is why thousands of Palestinians are treated in Israeli hospitals every year. But Israeli lives, the lives of Jews and Arabs both, have equal value. Israel has never threatened or carried out genocide (another meaningless accusation). Today, it stands in the media dock, accused of crimes it has never committed. Hamas is handled with kid gloves. Woe to us if the Scots ever change their minds and launch phase one of their haggis-fuelled invasion.

Dr. Denis MacEoin is a former university lecturer in Arabic, Persian and Islamic Studies. He is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the Gatestone Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

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